OPINION: Upping the ante
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business,06/06/2008
JUNE 6 | THE JAPANESE press has been full of speculation in the past week over purported plans by Toshiba to introduce a super up-converting DVD player that surpasses current up-converters and produces images from existing DVDs that are virtually identical to Blu-ray Disc.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
The speculation was touched off by a report in the Daily Yomiuri saying the new players would be released “by the end of the year.” According to the report, the new technology was made possible “by developing a large integrated circuit that can instantly convert images produced in the current format into high-resolution images.”
The report said nothing about pricing, nor about whether Toshiba plans to keep the new technology proprietary or will license it to other manufacturers.
So far, Toshiba has yet to officially confirm the reports, but I’m willing to bet they’re pretty accurate. In March, following Toshiba’s decision to abandon the HD DVD format, CEO Atsutoshi Nishida told the Wall Street Journal, “If you watch standard DVDs on our players, the images are of very high quality because they include an up-converting feature. And we’re going to improve this even more, so that consumers won’t be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images.”
Read the full column on ContentAgenda.com.
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| Submitted by: | Wicky 6/20/2008 7:50:52 AM PT |
None of the algorithms or the Cell chip are proprietary to Toshiba, and considering the joke that most of those present considered it (they showed it next to an un-upscaled image and refused to show a true 1080p source for comparison)
You can't get something from nothing, it's all sour grapes with Toshiba desperitely trying to hang onto royalties
| Submitted by: | JimC 6/10/2008 11:06:38 AM PT |
| Location: | Ohio |
| Occupation: | Software Engineer |
I'll believe this when I see it. No amount of upconverting can reproduce data that isn't there. Interpolation can improve images but it never can be identical to true HD and I highly doubt that it will be indistinguishable from a true HD source. The encodes of DVD's and blu-ray are very different and trying to take a source designed for standard def screens and faking it to make it look better on HD screens will never be as good or close to true HD content. Sorry. Anyone who believes this is either ignorant or a bitter HD DVD fan...
This is just an attempt to change the narrative away from Blu-ray. Sour grapes if you ask me...
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